Children root through the burning piles of plastic and wire, smoke searing their lungs as they scrounge for any little piece of valuable metal amidst the melted plastic and poisonous fumes. The scene just described occurs daily in third world and developing countries, and even in more industrialized nations such as China. Cargoes of old, outdated, or just plain unwanted technological devices arrive from wealthy Western countries like the United States and are deposited at often illegal sites where they are pulled apart by hand or burned in open pits, the impoverished workers collecting any re-usable material that can be sold and put back into the system where it will cycle through and again arrive at some foreign port where it will again be sifted through by hand. Clearly, discarded technology is a serious world problem, but it can be solved through simple, relatively easy steps that every citizen can take.